Various methods and solder ball mounting methods and apparatuses for mounting solder balls on electrodes formed on a surface of a printed circuit board, a semiconductor device or the like (hereinafter referred to as the “work”) have been proposed and implemented. Among them, there is a so-called dropping method disclosed in Patent Documents 1 to 4, for example, in which a surface of a work is covered with a mask including multiple ball holding holes through which solder balls can pass, the multiple ball holding holds are aligned with multiple electrodes on the work, and solder balls are moved across the surface of the mask to drop the solder balls into the ball holding holes.
These ball mounting methods use a squeegee, blush, blade, wire or the like to move solder balls on the mask to drop the solder balls into ball holding holes. Another method has been used in which a mask is tilted or swung to drop solder balls into holding holes.
Yet another method has been proposed in which a mask and a work are swung together while controlling the movement of the balls using a squeegee as disclosed in Patent Document 5.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 9-162533
Patent Document 2: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 10-126046
Patent Document 3: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2001-267731
Patent Document 4: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2005-244006
Patent Document 5: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2000-294676